In recent years, individuals have increasingly been relying on electronic storage to store and preserve sensitive information. While sensitive information was customarily preserved in paper format, and was therefore readily passed on to an heir or other representative upon an individual's passing or disappearance, electronic documents may not readily be transferable. The electronic documents may be securely encrypted, password protected, or protected from unauthorized access in other ways, and may therefore be inaccessible without a password. The electronic documents may also be stored on any number of devices and servers, in any number of user accounts serviced by different providers, and identifying and locating a particular individual's electronic documents can therefore prove to be a herculean task.
Traditionally, individuals preserved sensitive documents in hard-copy, paper, or other physical format (e.g., a disk, DVD, or portable storage device), and stored the documents with a family attorney or in a safe-deposit box at a financial institution. In the event of the individual passing or disappearance, the individual's heir, attorney, or other representative was able to gain access to the physical documents. The individual was therefore able to preserve the documents in utmost secrecy and security, but to nonetheless ensure that the documents would be released to selected person(s) in the event that the individual passed away, became unavailable, or became incompetent to grant such release authorization.
No electronic equivalent to the safe-deposit box exists. Much of an individual's life is now scattered among various storage systems, secure or not. In the event that the individual goes missing, passes, or loses mental capacities, tracing the individual's electronic content across a variety of systems, logins, passwords and other credentials is likely to be a daunting task.
Hence a need exists for an electronic equivalent to a safe-deposit box in which an individual can arrange to have any sensitive materials stored in a secure facility, and released to a representative party under specified conditions. As a corollary, there are related needs for providing security with respect to access to the sensitive materials by the individual and/or by agents or proxies designated by the individual to access the materials in the event that the principal individual is in some way unavailable. Similar security needs may arise for other services or applications.